YouSaid · the spoken record

Peter Wagner

lines on the record: 68
first: 2024-03-06
most recent: 2024-03-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“This is the original mission statement, right? Is to be the very best partner to founders building companies that matter in B2B technology from their early stages all the way through to self-sustaining company of enduring value. Ten years from now, I won't be leading that charge. The generation of investors that we've been developing here at Wing will.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's more institutional behavior than individual behavior. If you have a large firm, there's lots of people there, institutional self-preservation is sort of the name of the game. And I think a goal of, and no one will state this, right? But a lot of what's going on is you want to deliver good enough returns to raise that next fund at whatever scale you can raise it at. And at some point, your investors are so committed to the vehicle, they become like your allies too, because the last thing they want to do is say, hey, this thing that I committed to makes no sense. I mean, that's a brave LP, you know, sort of vouched for something for multiple funds and committed, you know, very large amounts of money to then say at some point, you know, this decision I made, you know, was actually a bad decision. That's unusual behavior too. So these things become self-perpetuating.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's say AUM model, right? I mean, so if you're managing large amounts of money, you have to deploy it. And if everyone's doing it, you won't be punished. You won't be punished for a mistake that everyone is making is, I think, part of what drives industry.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think all the above, you know, I mean, I just sort of don't understand what it means to build a company and to be a steward of other people's capital. I mean, I'll give you a name, SoftBank. Why did that ever make any sense? And who was that good for? I think there was a fair amount of damage being done by large amounts of capital being thrown around indiscriminately damaging the very properties it was investing in, distorting industry behavior. And again, not just from that one entity, but others that we can mention. So I think the distortions are real.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Large amounts of capital finding its way into the hands of the wrong hands in terms of the people that would be managing it and investing it.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think choosing expedients over the hard things that actually contribute to long term value. There's sort of quick fixes and sort of feel good measures that can take the edge off whatever is bothering you at a moment in time. But those chickens come home to roost so that this might manifest itself in a hiring decision where you opt for good enough instead of holding out for great. This might manifest itself in fundraising where you sort of take ready friendly capital instead of partners that can really help you. And, you know, eventually those accumulation of expediences compromise a company.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot of demand for unadulterated early stage venture capital being practiced by experienced people with a track record. And a lot of the very best people with those track records are within aircraft carriers now and the LPs are somewhat frustrated by, you know, okay, maybe I get to put a dollar in the early stage strategy and I got nine other dollars going across all these other strategies. And so when you show up with a pure play early stage strategy with people that know what they're doing, like there's a fair amount of investor interest in that. And that was certainly our experience in raising wing one and all the subsequent wing funds. So I think we've had a very positive experience and we're very fortunate in that regard. But I think it has to do with the nature of the product, if you will, and product market fit.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That venture is a scale game. I think it actually kind of runs quite the opposite that excessive scale gets in the way of excellence. You can be too small too, you know, don't get me wrong. And scale has its benefits. But I think it's a self-serving argument that sort of scale trumps all. I just don't buy it.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, I mean, it gets back to that enough rope to hang yourself, but also some guardrails to keep you from losing confidence. And so pushing that accountability, but also that group support in tandem is part of it. You know, I mean, when you're doing that, metrics are great, but I mean, you know, you need strategic analysis, you need judgment, you need a lot of other things that won't show up on the spreadsheet. And you got to develop those skills too if you want to be a good investor. And so making sure that that is part of the program is important.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think over-reliance on quantitative metrics in investment decision making and in early stage, I think the dependence upon this sort of suite of metrics as indicators of whether you should invest or not, it has its place, but like if it's overapplied early on”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, part of that is you also have to be willing to call a spade a spade, and sometimes you may have been mining a particular vein for years and you just have to say, you know what? Like no mas, this isn't fanning out. I devoted a substantial amount of my time to clean tech at one point, you know, just because, and this was in like 2006, 2007, 2008. And it was because, you know, no one else at the firm was spending any time on it. You know, I sort of felt like it was an exposure point. And I was like, okay, look, I'll do this at least with a fraction of my time for a while and ended up, I think that my biggest contribution was keeping us out of those deals.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Schwartz and Arthur Patterson told me pick an area that you think is interesting and make yourself the world's leading authority within it. Don't worry about what's going on elsewhere and chase after other stuff. Good things will happen elsewhere. But if you've, you know, if you do this, it'll work out. I think that right. That's why I'm always talking about focus. And they used a term called the prepared mind, which was how they were describing being the world's leading authority, you know, in your area.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the importance of marketing and venture capital. While the industry has scaled to the point where just things like word of mouth and direct personal touch are insufficient to reach the market. And even though I happen to prefer working that way, but I just have to get over myself a little bit on that.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I don't know. And I mean, you could ask the same question about funders. This is like the argument for secondary sales. And it's very closely related point. I kind of think no. I think hunger is important for everybody. Some people stay hungry even if they have substantial personal balance sheets. They have these other things motivating them besides just finances, other things they're trying to achieve or just their personalities are wired a certain way. I guess I kind of go the other way on that one.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not doing that well enough in the past. I mean, there's an example in my mind right now where there was a team that was recommending a sale. It was a little surprising that they were doing it. They even had a buyer on the line and the board didn't even know this was going on. So we're like, what are you guys doing? You know, this business is going great. And they weren't very articulate. I think they're a little embarrassed that they'd been running this kind of rogue Cortev operation. And so we didn't sell the company. And it ended up six months later that I fully understood the situation. And it's like, oh, they were right. If only I had been a little sensitive and instrument in trying to understand where they were coming from. You know, you want to pressure test, but at the end of the day, you got to pay close attention to what's coming out.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm pretty bad at this, Harry. There's others that are way better. And this is true personally. I tend to hold the public stocks of portfolio companies that have done IPOs and I just have ridden many of them straight into the ground. Sometimes it works out well and I think that more than makes up for it. I still hold a lot of our Facebook investment back from the Excel days. Never sold a share of Snowflake. And I'm optimistic that that'll turn out to be a good decision. But there's counter examples too. You don't control the environment. You have to just sort of recognize it and act appropriately. I try and really listen closely to the management teams because they are so much closer to the action. And if you're talking about should you sell a private company or not, their recommendations need to be really discerned and closely understood. And I've made the mistake of.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The importance of technology and its benefit in everything we do has increased so rapidly that it's kind of kept pace with the depressing factors. Now, it's cyclical, right? So there are times when you're overshooting and then there are times when you're undershooting, but sort of normalizing for the cyclicality over the somewhat longer term, I remain quite optimistic.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, post 2000, we went through a large reset, and there was a lot of people doing math saying like, oh, you know, for all this capital has been raised to earn a decent venture-style return on this capital, then this amount of value needs to be created, which means this many IPOs of this size, and that's just not possible. So buckle up for permanently reduced returns. And those guys were so wrong because it ended up actually that the outcome sizes did increase, the number of them did increase. Like what's going on is you just have technology becoming a more and more important component in a global economy. You can look at this just by measuring tech sector, narrow define tech sector as a percentage of global GDP, and that doesn't even count the technology enabled componentry that's in other sectors, you know, like financial services or whatever. And so I think just the relative...”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, and we've heard this before, this type of statement has been made at multiple times, even just during the time that I've been in the business. And it's been wrong every time.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a cyclical business, and so I think there are moments in the cycle when returns suffer and the factors that you described are part of the reason. There are other reasons. But every time somebody pronounces the death of a venture, you know, then something changes and”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think that the logic that, especially if you're devoting real time to a project, which is what we do as an early stage lead investor and not just time in the first couple years, but through the whole life of the company, there's only so many times you can take a shot like that. So the result, the impact on fund returns needs to be of a scale.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a great question, Harry. So when I got into the business, you know, there was the 20% rule, like, oh, we need to own 20%. And I remember thinking at one of my early partner meetings, I heard that. And I'm like, why? Where did that come from? Why 20? You know, that's a number. Okay. What about some other numbers? Aren't we just sort of, isn't it about like how much gain you make and the return on capital and, you know, all this? And I think it was just sort of an artifact of size of outcomes and size of funds at a certain moment in time. And I think, you know, 20% ownership, you know, with some dilution later on what constituted a good outcome at the time would sort of return a fund or maybe twice return a fund and so the math sort of hung together. It was the relationship between all those things. All those things have obviously changed now, right? Fund sizes are different, outcome sizes are different. So there's no real reason the 20% rule should make any sense.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But also, you know, Edo was also very persistent. And I just came to know what he was all about and developed such sort of high regard for him and what he was doing. But, you know, it took some time to get there. And in the end, you might say, oh, boy, Peter, you overpaid for that seed project. We invested $7 million at 35 posts, right? Like, oh, $35 posts for a company with no revenue and no customers and blah, blah, blah. That's what we did. I had conviction at that point around some important things. And I think in retrospect, you know, we're glad we did it. And, you know, is that a Fentonian case where, you know, we avoided the mental trap of price, maybe.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Less frequently than you might think. If I just try and think of the times where it's like, oh boy, yeah, we saw that deal, but we had no time to make a decision. So we passed in and it ended up being intergalactic. That doesn't come up that much. There's plenty of things we don't see and there's stuff that's outside of our scope that we just don't work on at all, but the stampeded process, I think, I just don't think the best companies are built that way. Founders need to take their time too in understanding who they're getting in business with. This is a long-term life decision. And I think the best founders do that. I met Edo Liberty, you know, the founder of Pinecone in 2019. He hadn't left AWS yet. It was like early 2019. I ended up leading that seed financing in the fall of 2020. That's how long that went on. And that was necessary, you know, both maybe I'm dense and took me a while to get it.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The second part I totally agree with knowability to actually really understand what you're getting into. That's a no-fly zone, I agree.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Price getting too high, often actually what that also is it's an indication that maybe my conviction is lacking. I don't have sufficient conviction around this investment. And so queasiness about price is actually a symptom that my conviction is thin. And that's like, that's an important voice to listen to because I might not actually be, price may not be the main thing that I'm worried about, but it's revealing this other thing that I need to pay attention to. So anyway.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, well, I think Peter's talking about that through the lens of early stage investing, because certainly if you were talking to a growth investor, they would not say that. When you're doing growth stage investing and ask any of the people that were piling large sums into companies in 2021 and early 22, how they feel about price right now, so price really matters, but in early stage, right, is there some ways you can be overly obsessed with price? And it's not to say that it doesn't matter, but I mean, I'll give you two examples or two ways that I think about it. One, and this is kind of obvious, like a low price is never a reason to do to make an investment, right? So there's no price that is sufficient justification for something that is otherwise flawed. I think some people call that a value trap. Then what about the flip side though? And what I found is when I'm getting really nervous about...”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Peter Peter and I were partners for six or seven years. I have tremendous respect for Peter. The day he told me he was leaving us and going to benchmark was one of the most discouraging days of my career. I really, really missed working with him.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes? And, you know, and you can get away with it sometimes just like I got away with it with that early deal if you can find other people's money on advantageous terms to sort of fund you through the valley of death there, big important companies like Tesla that wouldn't be what they are today, if there wasn't sort of certain miracle financings that occurred at just the right time. And so then people see those sort of hero experiments and they think, well, let's do another one of those not appreciating the singularity, you know, the unique circumstances that actually allowed some of those situations to prosper.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there is, which is like some businesses might be good businesses but really aren't venture appropriate. And that's kind of what I took away from this. There's a lot of opportunity to build big network operations type companies and look at the build out of the cellular industry, for example, or but there's also a capital intensity in a sort of financial engineering elements to that that make it very difficult to think you're going to do that out of venture capital, which is really built more around a lot of IP, a lot of team tenacity and unique perception and more moderate amounts of capital. And so I applied that lesson in other sectors later, steering clear of, you know, certain.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“deploying broadband and voice over IP and all these cool new technologies, optical networks, and we were doing high yield offerings. And then 9-11 happened, access to capital kind of went to zero for those sorts of things. And there were some big losses that piled up there. I had one company where we had invested pretty substantially. It had Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley co-leading the IPO, which they never did even then. So they were signed up as co managing underwriters. Nine months later, company was out of business. That's how fast access to capital flipped. And for a business like that, if you don't have access to capital, you don't have a business.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, my understandings are too. One of my very first deals, like in my first year in the business, I was spending a lot of time on the broadband build out and networking technology. And I invested in this competitive local exchange carrier, a CLEC, that was going to build out national DSL network because it just wasn't happening fast enough and there was so much demand for it. And this ended up being a huge win. The company went public. It was worth quite a few billion dollars. And Anna was like, wow, that was great. Let's do some more of those. And what I didn't really realize was sort of like it was an unnatural moment in time that companies like that could be built on venture capital. You know, like we were doing high yield debt offerings, you know, out of a startup, you know, to build out, you know, this broadband network and to quote one of my favorite co-investors, that works until it doesn't. I went and invested like two or three other of these next generation communication service providers that were like”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, well, still painful, but it's okay. I mean, we can laugh about it because obviously it was a great company. I think in terms of actual losses, you know, like, okay, sure, it's fun to talk about, you know, a success and pretend it's a loss. But like in terms of actual losses.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, there was an opportunity for a lead investor and then the existing investors were not backing off their pro rata. So you're either going to do 12. Or just play your pro rata, you know, with that, which is what we ended up doing. But, you know, obviously in retrospect, I wish we'd invested the 12. And, you know, the firm that did invest the 12, I think it's like the best investment in their history, you know, the series B, it's no. And so that was a big lesson learned for sure.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Literally because of the size of the financing relative to the size of our fund, we didn't step forward into that. And it's, I think, as an opportunity cost. Obviously, it's not a loss in sense of lost capital, but as an opportunity cost, probably the biggest opportunity cost I've ever been involved in back to this thing we were talking about earlier about being the focused player in a scaling industry with large pools of capital sloshing around. And this definitely informed my point of view a bit.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know Harry, my biggest miss is also one of my biggest wins. So we received investors in Snowflake and then in Series A investors and we were positioning ourselves to lead this series B and had a lot of conversations and I think a lot of agreement with the founders around a $10 million series B that was a good size for wing one, which is a very pretty small fund. And then, but we underestimated how rapidly the venture market was moving in terms of the size of financings and that $10 million financing suddenly wanted to be a 20. The lead check went from $6 to $12 and we felt like we couldn't do that within Little Wing one. So we passed. What a dumb move. Biggest, you know, in retrospect, right? You know, this is our company that we were already working in. And because of the size of the financing, we still love the company, right?”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doing that in Sales Tech, then, oh, here's a better CRM, unplug Salesforce and plug in my CRM. To me, that's a fool's errand. You know, that's not happening.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We better have line of sight on where that budget's going to come from and who owns it. And NetNew is not usually ever really net new. I mean, it might be a new line item, but hopefully your funding is available from things maybe that the customer no longer needs or sufficient gains that are going to pay for it. And that can take a little, I mean, that's part of the friction, right? You know, when you're proposing something new is it takes a little while for that to sort out. Another company I work with is Gong, pretty successful sales technology company. You know, what Gong brought to market, that was a net new thing. And it did constitute additional spend. But the gain from it was so clear and so obvious and the pull, you know, once users got their hands on it was so strong that other budget was able to be reallocated to fund that investment and it became kind of a must-have in the sales tool belt. I love projects like that. I mean, I'd rather have been.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think in that one, so it was a trust and safety product, and it was going to use AI to support the trust and safety efforts of businesses and brands online. This was thought like, okay, well, this is going to.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that large market needs to be there and the contain wedge into it needs to be there and we'll pass on a lot of things if they're missing one or the other. I'm still recovering from a recent mistake where market size bit us or bit me and we were betting on the development of a new market. It just kind of became clear that it was never going to become important to any broader population of companies. It was sort of a small set that really cared and then outside of that not so much.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's this interesting thing that we look for, which is, you know, we always want the very tightly defined entry value proposition. You know, the ICP is clear. The pain that you're addressing is clear. The value proposition is clear. But that needs to lead to a very large market. And so how do I have the tightly defined wedge, but also the large addressable market? It's incredibly difficult for a startup to do a second thing. Any sort of notion about, oh, well, I'll do this first thing and it's not that big an opportunity, but then I'll be able to do this second thing. It's like, oh boy. It's hard enough to do one thing.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes you have to get lucky. It's one of the risks that we talk about the most and only working in domains that you understand really well is an advantage. I think better proximity to judge when the architectural transition is likely to occur. You have a lot of customer intimacy. So you can sort of sense the level of urgency or the amount of frustration with existing approaches. But it's still easy to get wrong. I mean, I get it wrong all the time.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A sweet spot in there, Harry, because certainly category creation is difficult. It can take a long time and you can time it wrong. Many times people have attempted to create categories and they were right but early, which amounted to being wrong. Finding that opportunity which is close enough to something that people understand, so it isn't just a complete lobotomy for the customer, you know, so that so they have some grounding, but different enough so that it isn't just kind of an obvious next move by all the incumbents. That's kind of a sweet spot.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the architecture groups, and they just kind of got fed up with how they were being forced to do things and they saw the power of the cloud and they realized they were not going to be able to execute on what they thought was possible within Oracle. So they're just like, you know what? Maybe this will fail completely, but we're out of here and we're going to take a run at it. That's a fabulous archetype. So when I met those guys in the course of our seed investment in Snowflake, that was one of the things that really got me excited about working with them. Remember, these are like middle-aged French guys. They were not at a central casting for sort of fashionable founders. And they talk about that, you know, themselves, like who would bet on us.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, so in B2B technology on the part of the founders, you need to have just some glaring deficiency in the current approaches. And so you almost need to find founders that are just pissed off about the way that they've been forced to do something or their companies were pursuing something. And they almost just like can't look away. It's become like this personal animating factor. It's not all that often that, you know, you have a total outsider show up in a sector and it's like, I'm going to completely change this within B2B. I mean, I think in some of the consumer sectors, I can think of some pretty good examples, but like the best entrepreneurs that I've worked with, they were worlds experts, but they also had that and that personal motivation. Like if I think of the Snowflake guys, Ben Juan, Terry, the two principal founders, they had worked in the belly of the beast for decades over at Oracle, kept under lock and key.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pattern recognition is a very useful tool. You know, it's important, but you can't be a prisoner of it. The anomaly is the pattern sometimes, you know, like you're looking for the special company. A lot of times the pattern you're looking for is the pattern that can allow that specialness to express. So I guess there's a question of which pattern. One might be looking for”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think so, because it's hard to argue with the success that the firm has had. So I think that was, if that's what you want to do, right, then there's a strategy there. But strategies are involve choices. And so, okay, if you're going to go that road, there are benefits and there are consequences.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, I mean, really starting in like 2000, we began to extend the product line, if you will. And so we went from doing kind of early stage investing almost exclusively in B2B and actually specifically called out enterprise software and communications, right? That was the strategy that we saw in 96. And in 2000, we launched Excel London. And that was really just the beginning. And what came later, of course, were other geographic extensions in China and India stage extensions with the launch of the growth funds, sector expansions, you know, developed a big consumer practice, you know, which hadn't really been there before. What I think what we underestimated was”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is where you're sweating some investment, either a decision you're about to make about a new investment or some problem at an existing portfolio company, and you feel such intense personal accountability that you're literally losing sleep over it. And to this day, I'd lose sleep over this. And that, you know, in many ways brings out the essence of the business. Like we live, especially in early stage, we live in a world filled with uncertainty, trying to peer through it and make consequential decisions about capital and people and stuff that matters, but doing this in this zone of uncertainty is a really, really difficult thing to do. And so you have to sweat it in order to get good at it. Now, so that kind of individual accountability is super important, but group responsibility and support is also very important too. So the tension between individual accountability and group responsibility, getting that right is part of the magic.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Carrying someone's bag for three years or doing support work, you know, you were sort of on the stage, but you also had a lot of backup. Those are some of the key ingredients.”
2024-03-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 27 Years of Investing Lessons on Picking Founders, Price Discipline, Reserves and Selling Positions | Can Seed Investors Compete with Multi-Stage Venture Firms | Why Returns Will Not Worsen Moving Forward with Peter Wagner, Founder @ Wing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source